Matt Bell

James Iredell's "After the Revolution" follows a Mexican laborer named Ramundo across three periods of time and through two countries, eventually ending in 1980 in California, outside his family's home in Castroville. It begins, however, in Mexico in 1931, on the eve of Ramundo's sister's wedding, where Ramundo worries that El Guero, a local official, will come to rape his sister under the right of first night. One of the older workers named Edgar continues to goad Ramundo, but he's not so sure he needs to be worried:

The right to first night was an ancient custom, one hardly practiced now that the government looked toward progress, civilization. He'd seen El Guero order the men to load a pregnant woman a week and a half overdue, howling in an intense summer dry spell, into the bed of his pickup that they'd lined with blankets. He drove the woman to the main house and had her carried inside. Four days later the woman returned home, the child cozily wrapped in a blanket and gripped to her mother's chest. Despite the old man's stories of El Guero's horse thieving and bootlegging and other such crimes, he seemed to be a good man.

Despite this impression of El Guero, Ramundo takes Edgar's gun with him when he goes to see why El Guero's truck has pulled up in front of their home, and when he reaches his sister's room and find's El Guero there, he doesn't fail to act. He sees "El Guero standing, silhouetted in the moonlight, Lupe on her knees in front of him," and El Guero holding something, "a plate, a knife, Ramundo couldn't tell." And then, in the same moment, he aims the pistol at El Guero and fires, killing the man.

The story picks up again in 1951, across the border in California, after Ramundo has been released from prison and after he has worked to for several years as a farm laborer to earn enough money to marry and to have his first child, a son. He is working on learning more and more English, practicing with the field foreman, because he recognizes "how important it is to speak English with the gringos if [he wants] to make money." Overconfident about his abilities--or perhaps mistakenly believing that a common language is all it takes to make men peers--he makes a joke at the farm owner's nephew, one that angers the nephew enough that Ramundo's friend Juan has to step in and rescue Ramundo. Unfortunately, Juan is fired over the incident, and once again Ramundo is guilted and shamed for having acted too quickly or for not understanding the situations he finds himself in:

What would Juan do for work? What would any of them do, in the face of the whites in this white country, where whites signed the checks that paid them, where whites ruled everything, even the harvests that drove the Mexicans from field to field, living as they did, off the land?

By the time the seventies arrive, Ramundo has "continued to study the English language and American customs," celebrating the Fourth of July with his wife and family of four children. He has been promoted to foreman and then manager, and has even "made sure that his superiors and coworkers called him Ray, the Americanized version of his name." It is against this backdrop that he's called into his boss's offices and asked to become their new "Head of Labor Relations," a job that means helping his white bosses underpay and overwork his friends and countrymen. But what can he do? His boss slides a contract across the table to him, a piece of paper with a number that's "too much to refuse."

Ray is not unaware of how much he's given up, or what he's become in order to provide for his family, but he allows himself to make these choices because his "growing family needed the money," even as he's pitted against the United Farm Workers and made into the scapegoat for all the laborers' troubles. Still, he says that:

...in the dark caverns where his feelings hid behind a cinderblock wall of machismo he'd always hated gringos, white people, the people who acted as if the world were theirs, a world with no rom for words like pan and iglesia... it seemed to Ray that his entire life, and even know into middle age, he never would find refuse from whites. He decided to live with them.

Or so he tells himself, until one day--now 1980--when his sixteen-year-old daughter Mariela knocks on the front door--"her own door, to the house in which she lived"--with her new boyfriend at her side, "a white boy named Kevin Abernathy, a lineman for the North Monterey County Condors' football team." Ray refuses to let the boy in the house, and it is impossible not to feel his anger, and perhaps his self-loathing. He has made a series of bad decisions in his life, each meant to protect someone--first his sister Lupe, then his friend Juan, then his young family--and each time they have cost him at least as much as he has gained. And now, in this last decade of the story, he has even given up himself, ceased to be Ramundo, only Ray now, and now here is this one last thing that he is going to lose, one way or the other. He has never had a white man in his house, has never imagined his "offspring in close quarters with one," sees this last stubbornness as pride, as a "line [he] had long held." Where Iredell succeeds so brilliantly in the final moments of this story is the way in which he refuses to let Ray's decision be one of easy right and wrong, of racism versus acceptance. That's not the story we've been given, and not the one that Ray has earned. Instead, it becomes a decision of surrender, of whether this long-held line can still be maintained, and at what cost to him and his family.

Iredell excels on a number of levels here, combining an almost genre-Western prose style with his own skills for language into a very compelling voice that's impossible to ignore. Ray's slow defeat at the hands of his bosses and his adopted society is as heartbreaking as it is inevitable, but watching him trade his language and his culture and--at least in his eyes--his family away to the Americans he lives among is wrenching stuff, and the fact that his decisions are so often made to protect the very things he's losing makes it all the worse. This an excellent story, and a fine example of Iredell's always brave work. He's a writer I've become more and more aware of over the last year, and I've yet to be disappointed by anything he's written.

James Iredell's "After the Revolution" appears in Avery #4, which is perhaps the best issue yet of one of my favorite young literary journals. He is also the author of three chapbooks, Before I Moved to Nevada, Atlanta, and the forthcoming When I Moved to Nevada.